London,

St Trinian's

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Cert: 12A

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Dir: Oliver Parker, Barnaby Thompson. Cast: Rupert Everett, Colin Firth, Lena Headey

 

Description: For years, Headmistress Camilla Fritton has encouraged the 'young ladies' of St Trinian's to follow her doctrine of free expression and self-empowerment. However, her radical approach to teaching has done little to secure the school's financial future and now the banks are threatening to close the establishment once and for all. Determined to save St Trinian's from the bulldozers, head girl Kelly and newcomer Annabelle join forces with the teachers to raise all the necessary money by stealing Girl With A Pearl Earring from the National Gallery.

Country: UK. 2007. 100mins

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The belles strike again

 

Girl power: The new generation at St Trinian's

Sketchy: The film is mercifully not too long

What a drag: Rupert Everett is funny as headmistress Camilla

Look here too

• Meet the tribes of St Trinian's
• DVD box sets

Do you remember Alastair Sim and George Cole in Frank Launder's The Belles of St Trinian? If you do, it will surely be with affection. It wasn't exactly a classic British comedy and its successors in the genre were fairly dire, but the character actors on display in the original would make mincemeat of this lot in the remake.

In Oliver Parker and Barnaby Thompson's oddly sketchy film Rupert Everett takes Sim's parts, and Russell Brand reprises Cole's spivvy Flash Harry. Without wishing to be too rude to these two, it is definitely not a bargain.

Nor do Parker and Thompson manage the proper appreciation of cinematic farce that Launder evinced. Structurally, the new movie is a mess, and it doesn't look too convincing either, with cinematography that uses all sorts of old-fashioned dodges to raise a laugh. Launder, a real craftsman even when not at his best, would never have allowed it.

The plot, which brings the schoolgirl pupils up to date as Posh Totties, centres on Annabelle (Talulah Riley), thrown out of Cheltenham Ladies' College owing to non-payment of fees and plunged by her unscrupulous art dealer father (Everett) into what she sees as a young offenders' institution, where she is faced with some nasty new-girl initiations.

But when the school comes under threat from Colin Firth's ambitious education minister, who sensibly wants to close the place down, she combines with the motley crew to pull off the daring heist of Girl with a Pearl Earring from the National Gallery. This will presumably save the situation, though one is not certain how.

St Trinian's is fast-paced, mercifully not too long and deserves some laughs from time to time. Even if Everett is no Sim, he is funny as headmistress Camilla, though much less so as the duplicitous art dealer. But Brand should take another look at Cole's work before presenting himself as an actor again.

Among the rest - including the model Lily Cole and Mischa Barton - few have much chance to shine, simply because the screenplay thinks it is more amusing than it is. And it's strange that sex rears its head even less than in Launder's film for fear, no doubt, of a worrying political incorrectness about young flesh.

When you look at it again, the old film was not only superior but rather more radical. This St Trinian's looks as if it is aiming at the lowest common denominator, and finding it too often.

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